Eyes on ex-cons: Police monitor parolees

Nov. 13, 2013

Updated 10:11 p.m.

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Long Beach police officers detain a parolee while they search his home during an AB109 patrol. JEFF GRITCHEN, LONG BEACH REGISTER

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Long Beach police officer Dave Fritz lets the child of a parolee play with his phone after they arrested him in Long Beach during an AB109 patrol. The officers took care not to arrest the father in front of the child. JEFF GRITCHEN, LONG BEACH REGISTER

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Long Beach police officer Dave Demasi, left, and Dave Fritz search the room of a parolee in Long Beach during an AB109 patrol. JEFF GRITCHEN, LONG BEACH REGISTER

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Long Beach police officers look over files of parolees during an AB109 patrol. JEFF GRITCHEN, LONG BEACH REGISTER

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A Long Beach police officers arrests a parolees during an AB109 patrol. JEFF GRITCHEN, LONG BEACH REGISTER

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Long Beach police officer George Evans looks over files of parolees during an AB109 patrol. JEFF GRITCHEN, LONG BEACH REGISTER

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Long Beach police officers look over files of parolees during an AB109 patrol. JEFF GRITCHEN, LONG BEACH REGISTER

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Long Beach police officers surround the home of a parolee during an AB109 patrol. JEFF GRITCHEN, LONG BEACH REGISTER

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Long Beach police officers surround the home of a parolee during an AB109 patrol. JEFF GRITCHEN, LONG BEACH REGISTER

On Tuesday morning, the Long Beach Police Department’s newest task force was at work knocking on convicted felons’ doors to make sure they were complying with the terms of their probation.

“We’ll see if this guy lives where he says he lives,” said Sgt. Richard Hill, as he showed a photo of David Frey, a felon with a laundry list of drug offenses who had served a five-year stint in prison for vehicular manslaughter.

Frey was most recently sentenced to one year probation for possession of drug paraphernalia.

The sergeant and five of his officers fanned out through Frey’s supposed apartment building near 10th Street and Coronado Avenue, with no luck.

“He’s not here,” Hill said. “The landlord just said he was evicted three months ago. Nobody knows where he is.”

The police department’s Public Safety Realignment Team was formed in August in response to California’s historic prison realignment, which shifted thousands of inmates from state to county agencies in an effort to relieve overcrowded prisons. The mass overhaul began in 2011 when Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 109 following a U.S. Supreme Court decision ordering the state to cut its prison population by more than 30,000.

Under AB 109, those who have committed non-violent, non-serious, and non-sex offenses can serve their sentence in county jails instead of state prisons. Those deemed as low-level offenders released from prison are now supervised by county probation agencies rather than state parole.

The flood of inmates on the local level has led to concern from many agencies about the effects of parolees and probationers in their jurisdictions. The Los Angeles County Probation Department is grappling with the challenges of thousands of newly-released inmates now under its watch.

As a result, the whereabouts of many probationers, like David Frey, are unknown.

AN INFLUX OF INMATES

In Los Angeles County, 10,077 probationers are supervised by the Probation Department under AB 109. Of those, 1,854 – roughly 18 percent – are out of compliance, meaning their locations are unknown, said Deputy Chief Reaver Bingham of the Probation Department.

Bingham said the department is working with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and other agencies to locate missing probationers.

“We work very closely with outside agencies to look for absconders,” he said. “Unfortunately, part of this type of work is the reality that a number of these individuals have a very high recidivism rate and they’re going to abscond. We do everything we can to work with law enforcement and to go after these folks.”

Bingham said the non-compliance rate for AB 109 probationers is about the same compared with the rate for those under regular probation. Of the roughly 45,000 probationers under county supervision who weren’t released through AB 109, about 16 percent are unaccounted for, he said.

A major challenge, Bingham said, is the hiring and intensive training process for hundreds of employees to handle the influx of probationers. The Probation Department received funding under AB 109 to hire 470 new employees, but the process has been slow as the department works to identify quality employees who can work in law enforcement, he said.

Bingham said the department has so far identified potential employees for about two-thirds of the open positions.

He said the department has benefitted from collaboration with law enforcement agencies, like the Long Beach Police Department, who have formed task forces to aid local probation officers.

SIX OFFICERS AND A SERGEANT

The LBPD’s Public Safety Realignment Team consists of a sergeant and six officers who were each carefully selected based on experience and the ability to be a team player, officials said. The task force was made possible through additional funding under AB 109.

Hill and his six officers each day visit the homes of about a dozen probationers, knocking on doors and in some cases searching rooms for drugs, weapons and other paraphernalia. Hill said the team arrests about two people a day for violating the terms of their probation.

One of the biggest tasks is verifying the listed addresses. The Long Beach office has about 10 probation officers who oversee more than 580 probationers under AB 109, Hill said, adding that the office is working to fill about 10 new positions.

“They just don’t have the man power to check on each one of these addresses,” he said. “We’re here to try to plug the holes.”

When the team started in August, they discovered that about 70 percent of probationers weren’t living at their listed address. Through verifying addresses with the county and state, the team has whittled that number down to about 40 percent, he said.

With shortened jail times for many offenses, Hill said, the team is seeing familiar faces.

“I remember arresting this guy back in the 1990s. We’ve been arresting him for 20 years,” Hill said, as he pulled up to the home of Jim Hobbs, an AB 109 probationer with a string drug charges over the years.

Hobbs wasn’t home that day. His grandmother said he was at school, which later turned out to be anger management class, the sergeant said.

A major problem with AB 109, Hill said, is that officers on the streets are seeing a revolving door of criminals serving a fraction of their sentence in overcrowded county jails.

The deterrent is low for criminals who know they’ll serve short time for most petty crimes, he said.

“These aren’t just low-level offenders, these are career criminals,” he said. “They’re in and they’re right back out. It’s like they hit the custody lottery.”

SOLUTIONS

Officials say it’s too early to tell whether AB 109 is having direct impact on the city’s slight rise in property crime this year. Violent crime is at a 40-year low, but property crime saw an overall increase of 3 percent this year compared with the five-year average.

In some types of property crime, the increases are significant. Garage burglaries were up 54 percent between January and September this year compared with the five-year average, while residential burglaries were up 26 percent.

Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell said the department is still in the process of gathering data, but AB 109 is likely a contributing factor.

“Anecdotally we can say that it is affecting crime in the city because people who were incarcerated are now back on the street, and because of the high recidivism rate of this population, there’s a good percentage of those people who are likely to reoffend,” he said.

The chief said prison realignment is a work in progress as county, state and other agencies partner to reduce recidivism.

In one possible solution for repeat offenders under AB 109, the county probation department is working to establishing a Complex Case Committee with a review team comprised of the sheriff’s department and other local agencies to handle individual cases.

Long Beach Police Commander Michael Beckman, who oversees the department’s Field Support Division, said task forces like the Long Beach team can be a significant deterrent for repeat offenders by providing a regular police presence and resources for help.

“The problem of recidivism and habitual offenders is that many of these people have no job skills so they make a living resorting to old habits that involve crime,” he said. “This is not a problem we can solve strictly with arresting people. We’re hoping that with the help of our probation folks and others, we can work together to get people the resources they need.”

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